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2015/05/04

Launched? First posts up, at the very least...

My original intention was to hold back everything and only launch until I had enough articles to cover the 50's. Um... but as I've been working on this site my goals became progressively loftier and more expansive. In the six months or so I've been working on this - extremely intermittently - a lot of that time has been spent on wrangling graphics and double checking dates and the like. It is becoming apparent to me now that unless I drastically pair down my goal with this site or get someone else to work on it as well, it's just not getting done within three years.

So, I've decided, at least for now, to update things as-is from "near complete" status onwards. As such, I've released three articles today, two of which can also be accessed from the top menu, the third doesn't have a category page for it yet, but it's the next newest update under this post, so it shouldn't be hard to find.

Of these, the development of Godzilla and the 1st generation Godzilla pages are "done." The quotation marks are there because there is room for improvement on the character page, specifically in regards to his appearance in Godzilla Trading Battle, so in case I'm able to give that topic better coverage I will, but that's not a guarantee. In comparison, the page for the original film Godzilla is missing huge chunks, such as a section on Ifukube, the Americanization, and a "commentary" section which may or may not be written as a sort of "sequel" to my pseudo-apocalyptic journal leading up to gino 2, as a journal leading up to the actual 29th Godzilla movie and - potentially - the (second) rebirth of Godzilla.

IF the goals of this site are going to be paired down in the future, it may be to focus more heavily or even exclusively on the development articles, since that's sort of how I ended up with this idea in the first place, and it just sort of spiraled out of control into this sort of Bibliotheca Godzillica (woah, that would have been a cool name for it) that I'm attempting now.

I should also mention that my releasing these have less to do with the extremely comforting news of Higuchi's involvement in Godzilla's attempted resurrection, and more to do with Godzilla in Hell. I can safely say, as of now, if future generations remember Godzilla at all, three myths up to this point will absolutely survive without a doubt:

1. Godzilla's origin and its relation to real world events
2. Godzilla vs. Biollante, the most beloved and beautiful Godzilla story ever told
3. Godzilla's two stage death, and his subsequent journey through the underworld

Let's be honest here, NO mythic hero worth remembering hasn't gone on a journey through the underworld. You have to do it if you want to become immortal. This is non-negotiable. The fact that this is happening AFTER Godzilla's death in a real world context is just... sublime. It truly could not have come at a better time. Remember, as much as we keep telling the stories of Hercules and Gilgamesh and Thor and Dante today, we spend just as much time - if not more - focusing on the real world origin for them, their exploits, and the environment in which people told these stories. Godzilla's origin lie in the end of WWII, the uneasy peace of the Cold War, and the anti-nuclear movement, and it ends with social and marketing technology outpacing human cognitive ability to such a terrifying degree that actual mind control can't be more than a few years away. If anyone survives us, it has to be Godzilla who tells our story. It just has to be. He is everything our civilization is and... well, was.

That said, my decidedly morbid interest in hell and the nature of death, from the intensity of DOOM to the ponderous but definitely worthy of praise (first two cantiches of) The Divine Comedy, and interpretations of both the completely insane religious scare-tactics of indoctrination or trying to conceive of just the very idea of absolute oblivion, is the source of yet another goal I've set for myself. It seems pretty shallow on the surface, a 33-level megawad for GZDoom based on the Divine Comedy and other sources, but I've become increasingly fond of digging deeper and deeper into this idea of once you die... things get way, way fucking worse. It's been a fascination of mine for a long time and I can't tell if Godzilla in Hell will be an impetus for me to start working on that again, return to this site, or possibly both.

Keep in mind, this is in addition to the screenplay I'm writing and possibly my continued efforts at better emulating Primal Rage characters and stages into mugen... but that last one will be the first one to get scratched off the list. You also have to consider how much of my time is spent drinking, sleeping, watching dumb things on the internet, and other assorted unproductive activities.

If worst comes to worst, and this is the last time I ever update this site, at least I'll have something here, and that's gotta count for something, right? However I'm pretty sure that in the ~2.5 years I probably have left before my hand starts blinking, I'll come back to this place eventually.

2 comments:

If I want to get anything actually done, I have to keep a narrow focus and reign in what it is I'm trying to accomplish here. In some wild, unguessed future, I could expand this into including other Tohoverse stuff as well, and that's what I originally wanted to do here anwyas, but for now I'm just focusing on Godzilla.

About the conceptual stuff: I'm trying to track the whole process behind each thing I cover do get a better, more reliable picture of what stories were actually written and when, down to the minutest detail that I can dig up, so that takes time. Also it's not just about the conceptual stuff, but everything that got published/released as well. So while I'd love to spend some time looking into "Modron" or whatever the name of that weird SF piece about the frozen guy Banno was trying to do after Hedorah - you can tell I've committed all the details to heart of course - it'll have to weight.

Although if you want to know some things about The Mysterians, it was a Jojiro Okami joint first, and also Moguera wasn't present in the first draft. Also Koichi Kawakita wanted to do a remake in the early 90's, since that's his favroite non-Godzilla Toho SFX film.

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